[caption id="attachment_67416" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Commissioner Ed Hartnett."]
Policing is lately become a good deal more complicated.
Where once it could be described as keeping relative order on the streets, it is today a job that places officers in the front lines of the nation's defenses.
Edmund Hartnett's primary responsibility is keeping the citizens of Yonkers safe, be they on the streets, or tucked into their beds.
But there's a bigger picture now. He's also guarding his own patch of America against those who would wish America ill.
And so this week the man they call commissioner in New York's fourth, and perhaps third largest city, is taking an instructional course in various homeland security-related "best practices" organized by the Naval Postgraduate School in California.
As Hartnett put it, the gathering of police and fire chiefs, emergency service administrators and elected officials, is designed to achieve greater levels of efficiency and inter-service cohesion in response to, well, whatever a very dangerous world feels like throwing into America's path.
Hartnett doesn't need any convincing when it comes to the need for all the services acting as one in the critical hour. He was a top level officer with the New York Police Department on September 11, 2001, a day which Hartnett remembers as both the darkest hour, but also the finest hour for New York's Finest.
Being the head of a big police department presents many challenges, not all of them directly arising from crime and law enforcement.
At Hartnett's rank, politics comes into the frame. He serves at the pleasure of his mayor.
But Mayor Phil Amicone of Yonkers has seen no reason to be displeased with his commissioner to the point of showing him the door. Quite the contrary.
So Hartnett will mark five years in his current job on November 3.
But with November comes elections. Five days after Hartnett marks his five years, the citizenry of Yonkers will vote in a new mayor. Mayor Amicone has served two terms and will be handing over to a successor. And with succession comes, well, succession.
"There are three candidates and while I would like to think that whoever wins would consider keeping me on, this is a plum job and a new mayor might be reluctant to keep on the incumbent commissioner. Still, it would be nice to be considered," said Hartnett.
That said, he is ready for change if it should arrive at his door.
As Hartnett's level of policing there is not a lot of upward mobility in terms of rank, though with a bigger town comes, figuratively at least, a bigger badge.
There is also private sector work, the kind that has been offered over time to other high profile Irish top cops such as John Timoney, last year's Law and Order main honoree.
But though the private sector is an attractive idea, Hartnett is firm in his view that the public sector is his first choice.
"In law enforcement you can see tangible results if you are doing things right and that is very appealing to me. This is the business I know," he said.
By "you" Hartnett is not just referring to himself. He is immensely proud of the men and women serving in his department and gives them full credit for the fact that crime in Yonkers during his five year tenure has been heading in the right direction, that being down and down again.
"In spite of many challenges our officers have risen to the occasion time and time again and I'm very proud of them," Hartnett said.
Those challenges are familiar to any chief of police these tough times: budget cuts and personnel cuts and all manner of other cuts that make a hard job simply harder.
"The last three years have been especially tough, but we continue to try to deliver the highest quality police service to the people of Yonkers, despite the cuts. It has been a consummate team effort," Hartnett added.
Interestingly enough, Hartnett rates his department's, and by extension his own performance over the past five years as being especially good given the fact that when he first became commissioner the law and order situation in Yonkers wasn't that bad when compared to similarly sized cities such as, for example, Newark, New Jersey, which has been going through a torrid time of it in recent years.
Hartnett likes to joke with his pal Garry McCarthy, former police chief in Newark and now Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, that he had a harder time making an impression in Yonkers than McCarthy had in Newark.
This makes sense if you do a comparative study of the two cities. Bad things happen in Yonkers for sure, but in some parts of Newark, the qualifying bar for an improvement in crime statistics has been hovering around shoe leather level.
Statistics and figures play a central role in Hartnett's work. The now tried and tested CompStat crime tracking system shows where crimes are being committed and to what intensity. Yonkers is a patchwork quilt. Some parts are relative hot spots, while much of it is more suburban and less likely to show up on the stat sheets.
"You have to immerse yourself in the CompStat figures, keep an eye on them every day. You always have to proactive and reactive," Hartnett told the Echo in a previous interview.
Still, it's not all about statistics as far as the commissioner is concerned.
The fact that crime levels are down as a result of his department work is to be lauded, but he also places great emphasis on the ability of the men and women serving under him to deliver at all levels, from battling crime to fostering good relations with residents and local business, to dealing with day-to-day quality of life issues.
For Edmund Hartnett, it's the whole package that counts.
Yonkers, a conurbation that embraces gritty urban streets and leafy suburban ones, is a border town. And, like all such places, it has to take account of its next door neighbors. In the case of Yonkers, the biggest neighbor is, of course, New York City.
Where one city ends and the other begins is often of little account. A crime that starts in one can often end in the other.
Yonkers is a big city, and in some ways a small town. It nudges right up against the Bronx, is 18 square miles in area, and is home to a quarter of a million people. Hartnett, a youthful looking 56, has not traveled all that far to the Westchester City from his first days in Brooklyn and a childhood spent in Washington Heights, Manhattan.
In one sense, his life has been a northward march. After his early school days in Manhattan, they being at Incarnation Grammar School, he moved up to Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx and from there he graduated to Fordham University, where he earned a degree in political science. In 2004, he obtained a masters degree in public administration from Marist College.
November is a big month for Hartnett. As seen, it's the one in which he tends to get hired. And it was on an early November day in 1979 that he joined the NYPD. The young beat cop would rise steadily through the ranks, eventually becoming Executive Officer of the NYPD Narcotics Division.
"I have had a truly blessed career, both in the NYPD and with the Yonkers Police Department," said Hartnett.
"The Irish in America have a proud tradition in law enforcement. It's a tradition that I found very appealing when it came time to choose a path in life. Thirty two years later, it's clear that I made the right choice."
Hartnett is first generation, the son of Irish immigrants.
"The love of Irish music, Gaelic sports and the Irish culture was instilled in me from an early age. I am a member of several Irish organizations including the Police Emerald Society of Westchester County, the NYPD Emerald Society and Ancient Order of Hibernians," he added proudly.
But while Hartnett takes pride in his heritage, the two departments in which he has served and, most lately, in the officers under his command in Yonkers, he reserves a very particular pride for that most Irish American of stories, that being the police officer dad inspiring his son to be a police officer.
"One of my proudest moments, he told the Echo, "came as a Deputy Chief in the NYPD, attending my son Matthew's graduation from the NYPD Police Academy and pinning my police officer badge on his uniform. I am very proud that my son is carrying on in the heritage of Irish Americans in law enforcement."
Matthew Hartnett is never far from his father's thoughts, and not far most days in the literal sense. He patrols a beat just across that border separating Yonkers from the Bronx.
As such, the Hartnett connection with the NYPD remains through the second generation family member. That it might someday be reestablished by the first generation one is yet a possibility. But that's a story for another day.
